Drive Farnam Street through Blackstone this week and you'll pass both stories at once. At 4001 Farnam, the lights are off at Noli's Pizzeria, dark for the first time in nine years at that address. A few blocks east, on the downtown end of the same corridor, city crews reopened 13th Street between Howard and Dodge on Monday, along with the stretch of Farnam between 11th and 13th. Same street. Same week. Two completely different signals about where this neighborhood actually stands.
If you've been following the headlines about Blackstone the last two years, you already know the construction narrative: streetcar work, torn-up sidewalks, businesses bleeding money. That part is true and well documented. What the headlines from this month leave out is that the construction calendar and the restaurant's calendar are not running on the same clock, and confusing the two makes the neighborhood look worse off right now than the actual timeline supports.
What Actually Closed the Doors on Farnam
The proximate cause of Noli's closure wasn't a road closure. It was mechanical. Owner Joel Marsh told WOWT that two coolers failed within six weeks of each other, and he didn't have the money on hand to replace them. That's a specific, ordinary kind of business emergency that could happen to any restaurant in any neighborhood in any year.
What makes it land differently in Blackstone is the two years sitting behind it. Marsh has said the location, in this building since a 2017 move within the neighborhood, had run nine years without a problem like this. In January, he told 3 News Now the Blackstone location had lost more than $300,000 in revenue tied to streetcar construction over the prior two years. He launched a GoFundMe after the cooler failures that had raised more than $6,000 as of last Wednesday. Noli's second location, at 6307 Center Street in Aksarben, has stayed open on its normal hours the entire time.
Marsh has also been candid about what the last two years cost him personally, describing them to WOWT as the hardest stretch of his life, with periods of depression and trouble functioning. That's not a detail to gloss past. It's also not a detail that tells you anything about where the neighborhood's construction timeline actually stands, which is the part worth untangling.
The Corridor's Real Deadline Isn't 2028
Every story about the Omaha Streetcar mentions the same end date: full passenger service in 2028, running the 3.2 miles from the riverfront through downtown, Blackstone, and out to the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That's accurate, and it's also the wrong number if you're trying to figure out how much longer the disruption directly in front of Blackstone's restaurants and shops is going to last.
The track work specific to Farnam Street in Blackstone is scheduled to wrap at the beginning of next year, not 2028. That's a July report from WOWT, and it lines up with what deputy chief of staff Steve Jensen said back in February: that construction should ease up by the middle of 2026 as the project shifts from utility relocation into more predictable mainline track laying. The 2028 date is about when trains start running system-wide. The date that matters if you own a storefront on Farnam is early 2027, when the physical tearing-up of the street in front of your business is supposed to stop.
This week's reopenings are the visible evidence that the shift is already underway:
- 13th Street between Howard and Dodge reopened to traffic Monday, September 21.
- Farnam Street between 11th and 13th reopened the same day.
- 31st Avenue at Farnam, the connector between Farnam and Midtown's Turner Park, reopened back in mid-July after months closed.
None of those are inside Blackstone proper. They're proof the corridor is being handed back to drivers in sequence, moving outward from downtown, which is exactly what you'd expect if the Blackstone segment itself is next in line to finish rather than years away.
One Block Over, the Fear Didn't Match the Foot Traffic
Not every business on Farnam has told the same story as Noli's, and the contrast is worth sitting with. Jay's Games & Beer Garden opened less than a year ago and has operated entirely during construction. General manager Jessie Joy told WOWT in July that the summer slowdown they were seeing was the normal seasonal dip for bars and restaurants, not something unique to Blackstone.
Joy said the bigger problem wasn't access. It was a rumor. Customers assumed there was nowhere to park, when in fact the Blackstone parking garage offers two free hours and there's additional lot space nearby. She's been posting parking tips on social media to correct the misconception directly. Her read: walk a couple of extra blocks and it's not a big deal.
That doesn't erase what Noli's went through. It does mean the construction itself isn't a uniform sentence handed down to every business on the street. A restaurant that opened after the barricades went up built its customer habits around the disruption from day one. A restaurant that opened nine years before the barricades arrived had to watch its customer habits get rewritten in real time. Those are different problems, even on the same block.
A Second Loose End Got Tied Off This Month Too
Streetcar track work isn't the only thing resolving in Blackstone this month. In June, a foundation wall collapsed near 38th and Farnam, prompting evacuations and an investigation. The building next door, Cunningham's, was declared structurally sound but dealt with a sidewalk closure that limited customer access for weeks afterward.
Last week, the Omaha City Council unanimously approved a $700,000 settlement with the owners of the collapsed building at 3810 Farnam. The city will acquire the property, have it demolished, and prepare the site for redevelopment. Kiewit Infrastructure Co. has agreed to contribute $200,000 toward the settlement to help offset streetcar project costs, even though the collapse itself was a separate structural failure rather than a construction-caused incident.
It's a different problem from the track work, with a different cause. But it's one more piece of unfinished business in the same few blocks getting closed out in the same month, which adds to a pattern that's easy to miss if you're only reading one headline at a time: September is when a lot of loose threads in Blackstone happen to be getting tied off at once.
What This Actually Means If You Live Near Farnam Street
The honest answer on Noli's is that nobody knows yet. Marsh hasn't said whether the Blackstone location reopens this week, this weekend, or at all, and that uncertainty is real and shouldn't be smoothed over.
What the timeline does tell you is that the disruption causing the two years of losses behind that decision is closer to its end than its middle. Track work on Farnam in Blackstone is scheduled to finish early next year, not in 2028. The reopenings happening on the corridor this week aren't a one-off, they're the next entries in a sequence that started downtown and is working its way toward Blackstone. The Blackstone Business Association has a larger fall event planned for this September, which is its own small vote of confidence from the people who run the district day to day.
If you live in this neighborhood, you already knew construction has been hard on your favorite places. What's worth knowing now is that the part of the story still unfolding, block by block reopening, is measured in months from today, not years.
If you're watching Blackstone, or any corner of Omaha, and wondering what a shift like this means for property values or timing a move nearby, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground context Stacey Reid tracks across Omaha's neighborhoods. Reach out to schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
